Reading #6:  Not Doing but Thinking: the Role of Challenge in the Gaming Experience

do I write about anything besides games?

Introduction:

At last, I present the final of the required blog posts...for assignment one.  It was written by four researchers at both University College London, and the University of York.  They are:

Anna L Cox, UCL Interaction Centre, University College London.  http://www.uclic.ucl.ac.uk/people/a.cox/people.htm
Paul Cairns, Dept of CS, University of York.  http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/~pcairns/

These two people appear to be undergrad students, because they have no personal webpage:
Pari Shah, Psychology & Language Sciences, University College London.
Michael Carroll, Dept of CS, University of York.

Summary

Gaming is arguably one of the most successful applications of computing.  Immersion is one of the key aspects of video game design.  It is directly responsible for making the user enjoy the game by allowing them to become cognitively unaware of their surroundings.  This paper revolved around how to maximize that immersion, so as to improve the gaming experience (GX).

An example of a tower defense game, used in the study

Related Work

Each of these papers highlight studies that explore how to best utilize whatever application they may choose, much like this one.

Optimal Experience of Web Activities.  This discusses the best way for the user to experience the internet via web browser:  http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0747563299000382

Video Games and the Future of Learning.  I actually worked for a game developer who created games intended to help people learn.  This explores the possibility of teaching students via game, so that we can better hold their interest:  http://gise.rice.edu/documents/FutureOfLearning.pdf

From Content to Context:  Video games as designed experience.  This paper combines the idea of teaching with video games with increasing the teaching effectiveness by increasing immersion:  http://edr.sagepub.com/content/35/8/19.short

Understanding Online Gaming Addiction and Treatment Issues for Adolescents.  This paper deals with the issue of too much immersion in a game, whenever it starts to pull reality out from under players: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01926180902942191

Social Software: Fun and Games, or Business Tools? Discusses the potential of web software in the new age of "web 2.0":  http://jis.sagepub.com/content/34/4/591.short
 

A Grounded Investigation of Game Immersion:  Studies three varying degrees of game development, much like this paper does:  http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=986048

Behavior, Realism, and Immersion in Games.  This paper sets out to clearly define the term immersion, and what affects it: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1056894

Measuring and defining the experience of immersion in games: Just like the previous paper, this one also attempts to better define immersion, since gamers and reviewers seem to have different definitions:  http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1071581908000499

I wish I were a warrior: The role of wishful identification in the effects of violent video games on aggression in adolescent boys. This study tested the levels of aggression in young poorly educated boys.  The results said that the more aggressive boys related to video game characters, especially when they were well immersed in the game:  http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/dev/43/4/1038/

Evaluation

There were three experiments performed on subjects.  

The first tested how physical effort affects immersion. This was done using a tower defense game.  The researchers used an objective quantitative measure for this, because it simply counted how many "creeps" were destroyed before the player was completely overwhelmed.  There was also a Qualitative survey at the end of the test, asking how the players felt during each game.

The second test measured the effect of time constraint.  This was done by having players play a Bejeweled game, half playing in a timed mode, the other half playing with unlimited time.  This time, the quantitative value was how many matches the player could make before their timer ran out, or if they were playing an untimed mode, how many sets before there were no possible moves left.  Once again, they were required to take a qualitative survey after the games.

The third and final test measured the cognitive difficulty of the game.  This was accomplished by having the subjects play games of Tetris at varying difficulties.  The objective quantitative value was how many rows the player could create before their screen was overflowed.  The subjective quantitative value was a personal rating of how good at the game the player felt that they were, and then a numerical rating of how difficult they thought the game was.

Overall, the researchers found that the key to immersion is to have it so that the game's difficulty level best matches the player's skill.

Discussion

I know firsthand the power of immersion over a player.  As far as game design goes, this is a very important study to do.  However, due to its importance, these studies have been done many times before, so this one is not particularly novel.